1 February 1998
‘Barbie Girl’ was a smart, playful subversion of our sexist cultural objectification of women. Will ‘Dr Jones’ drop similar truths about, say, the Western appropriation of indigenous artefacts, the negative stereotyping of all Asians save for a solitary baseball-cap-wearing kid driving a car, or the use of consumerist household appliances to survive nuclear Armageddon? Well, no. The Indiana Jones angle is literally just shoehorned into the chorus of an otherwise unspecified love story. Far be it from me to be cynical about the music industry, but I suspect this was done purely to work an angle for another cartoonish video. Cue ‘natives’ in grass skirts and tribal masks putting the Europeans into the cooking pot, only for white saviour Gregg Wallace of MasterChef to intervene, pointing out that the flavour combination of boiled European overpowers the rest of the dish.
As for ‘Dr Jones’ the song, which so far is only a pretext for ‘Dr Jones’ the video, it’s a big day out for the law of diminishing returns. All the wit and charm of ‘Barbie Girl’ has been scoured away, leaving us with only the bubblegum Euro-techno of ‘Barbie Girl’. It’s like a Fisher Price toy radio playing a Fisher Price toy piano while outside a Fisher Price toy jackhammer pounds into a Fisher Price toy pavement. Don’t listen to it, or your face will melt off.
